The Beauty And The Beast

Do animals have consciousness, asks Anjan_Bilal, recollecting Jane Goodall’s view that they do have mystical moments.

Primatologist Jane Goodall who is considered the world’s foremost expert on chimpanzees believes animals are capable of having mystical moments. Along with evolutionary biologist Marc Bekoff, she has reported observing chimpanzees dancing with total abandon at waterfalls that emerge after heavy rains.

According to Goodall, some of the chimps even appear to dance themselves into a trance-like state, as some humans do during religious and cultural rituals.

That Feeling Of Wonder

“Is it not possible,” wonders Goodall, “that these performances are stimulated by feelings akin to wonder and awe? After a waterfall display, the performer may sit on a rock, his eyes following the falling water. What is it, this water?”

Bekoff, too, thinks animals may have spiritual episodes which he defines as experiences that are nonmaterial, intangible, introspective and comparable to what humans have.

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Writing in Psychology Today he says, “Meagre as it is, the evidence seems to say that yes, animals can have spiritual experiences, and we need to conduct further research and engage in interdisciplinary discussions before we say that animals cannot and do not experience spirituality.”

That interdisciplinary study appears to have begun and, indeed, already suggests it’s likely animals have similar feelings of wonder and awe as humans often do.

Out-of-body Experiences

According to Kevin Nelson, a professor of neurology who has been studying the process for over three decades, spiritual experiences originate deep within primitive areas of the human brain — areas that are also shared by many other animals with brain structures like our own. Therefore, he feels there’s little reason to believe that they don’t function in a similar way for them too.

Earlier, in a paper published in Neurology, Nelson had also suggested that changes in the brain’s arousal system which regulates different states of consciousness including dream sleep and wakefulness, could be the cause of what some people believe are out-of-body experiences. And these as we know are often associated with mystic states.

“In humans, we know that if we disrupt the region of the brain where vision, sense of motion, orientation in the Earth’s gravitational field and knowing the position of our body all come together, then out-of-body experiences can be caused literally by the flip of a switch,” says Nelson. “There is absolutely no reason to believe it is any different for a dog, cat or primate’s brain.”

Animals And Consciousness

What bolsters such claims is the fact that the mental divide between humans and animals is now turning out to be not so great in some other closely related cognitive areas too.

Pet owners, for example, have always believed their dogs or cats were able to dream but it was only about 10 years ago that scientists at MIT discovered animals can and do dream on a regular basis. Rats with implanted electrodes that were made to run a maze and had their brain scans recorded were found, while asleep, to be repeating the exact signature of neural activity generated by them earlier in the maze.

Also, up until very recently, it was thought that animals were not conscious like we are and unable to recognise themselves in a mirror.

However, research with dolphins, elephants, European magpies and some higher primates has shown that these animals are capable of knowing the difference between a reflection and another of their kind.

If a dolphin is surreptitiously smeared with a dye on a part of its body, which it can only see in a mirror, it twists and turns to look at it better and even tries to rub it off. It knows the image is of itself. In other words, it’s self-aware. (Incidentally, humans tend to fail the mirror test until they are about 18 months old.)

What Is It, This Water?

Dreaming, being aware of themselves as individuals, having out-of-body experiences...is it all that difficult then to understand why a chimpanzee could find a waterfall after a cloudburst awe- inspiring, and wonder — what is it, this water?